Austin City Council is pushing to sell its share in a coal plant that provides a third of the city’s electricity in the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions – a pattern being mirrored across the country as Americans are hit with soaring energy prices.

“Selling would help the city carry out an ambitious plan to curb its contribution to global climate change,” reports the Austin-American Statesman[1], adding that the sale of the Fayette power plant is being lobbied for by environmental groups.

The decision looks like it could be put to voters, an outcome Mayor Lee Leffingwell is keen to avoid as he tries to rush through Austin’s sale of its share in the plant without democratic approval.

Despite the fact that the coal plant provides a cheap and stable source of energy, its elimination will be replaced by wind, solar and natural gas, all of which equate to higher energy prices for consumers who are already struggling under a crippled economy.

As we have previously documented[4], while the Obama administration failed to ram its draconian ‘cap and trade’ bill through Congress, the EPA has been quietly enforcing such regulations via the back door, by denouncing carbon dioxide, the life-giving gas that plants breathe, as a deadly poison. This has led to both planned and existing clean-burning coal plants which emit nothing but CO2 and water vapor being mothballed across the country, driving up energy costs.

This maxed out grid is a consequence of federally enforced EPA restrictions that have led to the delay, mothballing and closing down of coal-fired plants. In Texas, approval for the much-needed Las Brisas Energy Center [6]has been delayed for years as a result of EPA meddling in Texas’ energy policy. Numerous other coal power plants[7] around the country that would have eased America’s artificially created energy crisis have also been shut down or abandoned.

Groups like the Edison Electric Institute[8] have previously warned that the new rules eventually “cost utilities up to $129 billion and force them to retire one-fifth of coal capacity,” prompting a wave of coal plant shutdowns. Americans will be hit with more energy rate hikes even as they struggle to pay the bills now.

Before his election, Barack Obama himself promised to “bankrupt” the coal industry[9], an agenda that has led to rolling blackouts as Americans are forced to foot the bill as part of the move towards a “green economy,” which has little to do with the environment and everything to do with hollowing out America’s industrial base so that the country may be more easily swallowed up by the “post-industrial revolution” that remains the goal of the global elite.

However, Obama’s biggest political backers General Electric are not subject to the EPA’s draconian news rulesthanks to a waiver handed to them by Obama[10]. In providing the likes of GE with a waiever, the White House is greasing the skids for a giant consolidation of the energy industry, shutting down competition and creating artificial scarcity – thereby driving up costs for the American people.

The deliberate deindustrialization of America has nothing to do with protecting the environmrnt. Whereas the competitiveness of America’s energy industry is being crippled by the EPA and the White House, China and Mexico are building dozens of new power plants every year[11] which fall well short of the clean-burning technology standards adhered to in the United States.

This is about the implementation of the UN’s Agenda 21[12], which operates under the guise of “sustainable development” yet is clearly part of a stealth agenda to centralize control over energy, bankrupting America in the process as part of the move towards a crony system of one world governance.

Watch a video blog by Alex Jones on this issue below.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com[13]. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.